Chapter 12 - The Blackmail
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of forced smiles and mechanical laughter. Every time a stranger walked past our bench, my neck tightened, my eyes darting to evaluate whether they held a hidden threat. By the time 4:00 PM rolled around and I handed Hope back to Claire at the silver SUV, my palms were slick with nervous sweat.
Claire rolled down the passenger window just enough to secure Hope’s seatbelt. She didn't look at me; her eyes were fixed straight ahead on the dashboard.
"Have a good week, Hope," I murmured, kissing the top of my daughter's head.
"Bye, Daddy! See you next Saturday!" Hope waved cheerfully as the SUV pulled away from the curb, disappearing down the shaded suburban street.
I didn't head back to my studio apartment immediately. Instead, I drove to a dimly lit diner on the industrial outskirts of town, sliding into a sticky vinyl booth near the back. I pulled out my phone and stared at the anonymous email again.
There was a cryptographic wallet address attached to the bottom of the message, accompanied by a strict demand: $50,000 in cryptocurrency transferred within forty-eight hours, or copies of your old corporate audit files—the ones detailing your embezzlement of marketing funds to wine and dine your mistress—will be forwarded directly to your ex-wife's custody attorney and the local school board.
Embezzlement.
The word echoed in my skull with deafening volume. Back when I was a senior VP at the tech firm, in the dizzying height of my arrogance and my affair with Samantha, I had occasionally fudged corporate expense reports. I had billed upscale dinners, hotel stays, and even the diamond bracelet under fake client acquisition codes. When Sterling fired me and the firm conducted their internal audit, they had quietly buried those specific criminal findings to avoid public scandal, opting instead for a quiet termination and a civil asset freeze.
Someone had leaked those sealed corporate audit files. Someone who knew my past inside and out.
My mind raced through the roster of ghosts from my old life. Sterling? No, he was a billionaire CEO who wanted nothing to do with my rotting carcass. Samantha? Samantha didn't have the technical expertise to hack corporate servers or track legal filings; she barely knew how to balance a checkbook without an assistant.
Then, a terrifying realization dawned on me.
Marcus.
Marcus Vance—my former chief financial analyst at the tech firm, a man I had personally mentored, promoted, and eventually thrown under the bus when the internal investigation began pointing fingers at the marketing department. I had saved my own skin for three extra weeks by quietly shifting the blame toward his division before my own suspension hit. Marcus had lost his job, his reputation, and his career trajectory because of my cowardly scapegoating.
He hadn't disappeared. He had simply been waiting for the exact moment I managed to rebuild something worth destroying.
May you like
I pulled out my battered laptop, connected to the diner's sluggish Wi-Fi, and opened my banking app. My account balance glowed back at me: $1,420.35.
Fifty thousand dollars might as well have been five million. I couldn't pay. And if I didn't pay, Marcus was going to drop a nuclear bomb on the fragile, hard-won peace I had built with Claire and Hope.
